Archaeogeek’s quick October roundup
Comments(3) Well, it doesn’t seem like a whole month has passed since FOSS4G. but it’s nearly halloween so I guess it must have done. Here in Lancaster things have been mighty hectic, with office moves and related changes (I now know a lot more about VOIP phone systems than I ever wanted to). It’s only this last week where I feel like I’m actually back in the saddle and doing real work again.
There have been a number of interesting posts over the last few weeks relating to subjects close to my heart:
- A great post from Vector One about why we need National Mapping Agencies . Once and for all, I like what Openstreetmap are doing but there are cases when it’s not enough. Having said that, I’m very interested in another blog that has recently started up about mapping Durham, my old university town for openstreetmap.
- Another great post from Publishing Archaeology, about… umm… Publishing Archaeology, exploring the idea that we (archaeologists) need to publish outside of our rather esoteric discipline if we want to be taken seriously. Most archaeologists will have had conversations with sceptics about whether what we do actually matters, and some of us can even cite reasons why archaeology does matter (go and read Collapse if you need convincing) but until we start pushing our work as sociologically, economically, environmentally important then we’re not going to get very far.
Other developments here in Archaeogeek towers: Mapguide Open Source now works happily on Ubuntu 7.04 and I’m just about to start trying to integrate the OGR provider for connecting to databases, and Portable GIS is being demoed by a select group of guinea pigs so things should move forward with that quite soon…
Hi Jo,
You left a comment over at WebWorkerDaily about marking (and later pruning) links from RSS that you might want to read… I work on various Firefox extensions (GTDInbox, MeeTimer); and I’m interested in doing something that might help you.
I’d love to get some insight into how you make it work (and how it fails for you) at the moment – so if you feel so inclined, please drop me an email, andy@productivefirefox.com.
I’ve met one or two archeology students here in Durham that give the impression a free map might be valuable to them.
Actually it’s more than that, because OSM has the tools to map what you like and then have create an archeology-specifc output.
However I haven’t got to find in getting anybody to start using this and I have a good lack of knowledge about the subject or course. If your interested in getting OSM known in this area, drop me an e-mail and lets see what we can do.
Hi Gregory,
In a lot of cases, Openstreetmap is great, and I am planning to use it in what I do (if I can get python fixed on my machine I want to try the arcgis plugin for it), but it really does depend on what you use maps for. If all you want to do is look around and get directions then fine, it’s just that for landscape regression and such like you need to be sure all the features are mapped, and in a consistent way, and we don’t have the time or money to go out and map them ourselves. For that kind of thing we need the OS maps. Nuff said.
There’s certainly a case for using OSM a lot more in archaeology- so i will drop you an email after the weekend and we can talk about ways of doing that.
Thanks for dropping by!
Jo